PLASTIC DYNAMISM
(SCOPE)
Industrial Design
Visualization
Computational Design
A set of three acrylic awards for Zeit Company that translate Umberto Boccioni's Futurist concept of plastic dynamism into physical objects. Each one uses a different fabrication method to suggest continuous motion and the merging of form with its surroundings.
(CHALLENGE)
Awards are usually inert objects: they commemorate an achievement without expressing anything about it. The challenge was to take Futurism, a century-old philosophy built on speed, transformation, and dissolving the boundary between an object and its environment, and make it manufacturable in acrylic on an existing production line. Each piece had to stay within Zeit's material and process constraints while still reading as motion.
(OUTCOME)
I developed three pieces, each isolating a different Futurist principle. Nebula is a seven-layer assembly of gradient-printed circles that resolve into an orb, appearing to either form or dissolve. Abyss is a 4:1:1 column finished in an ultra-black paint that absorbs 99.4% of visible light, so its base disappears in a dark room. Odyssey is a parametrically modeled ripple surface cut on a 5-axis CNC mill and proportioned 1:4:9, after the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Together they show that one design philosophy can hold up across layered assembly, specialty coating, and multi-axis milling.
